• Death, Restitution, and Legal Pluralism in Upper Canada

    Nathan Ince On July 14, 1832, Jacob Sahkeconabe was shot and killed by Joseph Graverod. Both individuals involved in this tragedy were young, variously described as boys, youths, or young men, but otherwise they came from different backgrounds.[1] Sahkeconabe belonged to the Anishinaabe community of Mnjikaning, more often known to outsiders as Yellowhead’s village. For… Continue Reading

  • “Miseries in the name of Liberty”

    A Review of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021). Todd Webb This bleak and brilliant book offers a history of the antebellum United States in the wider context of its North American neighbours. That story, for Alan Taylor, was dominated by three processes: the… Continue Reading

  • De-sanctifying Written Constitutions

    Review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021) 502 pp. $35.00. Elizabeth Mancke and Adam Nadeau[1] In the conventional metanarrative of modernity, written constitutions symbolize progressive trends, political events that were considered “benevolent and normally acted as… Continue Reading

  • Collecting the World in Newfoundland

    Misha Ewen  Sugar, tobacco, porcelain, and cod. These worldly goods—that came to define early modern empires and networks of global trade—could all be found in the homes of Newfoundland women Sara Kirke and her sister Frances Hopkins. The Pool in Ferryland was their home throughout the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century. Their… Continue Reading

  • Herring, the Moral Economy, and the Liberal Order Framework

    Elizabeth Mancke and Sydney Crain In 1819, New Brunswick’s assembly passed its first legislation regulating just the herring fishery for the “Parishes of West-Isles, Campo-Bello, Pennfield, and Saint George” in Charlotte County; two years later, an amendment added the Island of Grand Manan.[1] Since its first sitting in 1786, the assembly had passed nine statutes… Continue Reading